


A Fish without a Bicycle

by Charlie9646



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Child Abuse, Comments about Petunia’s weight made by Vernon, Divorce (not main pairing), Domestic Violence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Finding Family, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, Hurtful comments from Vernon to Harry, Marriage, No Smut, Poverty, Trans Female Character, Trans Harry Potter, Trans Male Character, Trans Severus Snape, Vernon Dursley Being an Asshole, mentions deaths of minor characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-16 19:00:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29829450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charlie9646/pseuds/Charlie9646
Summary: Lily, Petunia, and Severus did everything they could to run from Cokeworth, but two of them for various reasons end right back where they started.Or when out of desperation Petunia ends getting help with Lily’s child from the person she least expects.
Relationships: Petunia Evans Dursley/Severus Snape
Comments: 6
Kudos: 41
Collections: International Witches Day





	A Fish without a Bicycle

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [International_Witches_Day](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/International_Witches_Day) collection. 



> Thank you to meditationsinemergencies for alphabetaing this and Zorak23 for telling me to do the thing. This wasn’t the easiest thing for me to write and it might be one my favorite things I have written. Petunia is a hard nut to crack.
> 
> **Prompt:**
> 
> Marsha P. Johnson was an American gay liberation activist, trans woman, drag queen performer. Known as an outspoken advocate for gay rights, Johnson was one of the prominent figures in the Stonewall uprising of 1969. Johnson was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front and co-founded the radical activist group Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.), alongside close friend Sylvia Rivera. Johnson was also a popular figure in New York City's art scene, modeling for Andy Warhol, and performing onstage with the drag performance troupe Hot Peaches.[6] Johnson was known as the "mayor of Christopher Street” due to being a welcoming presence in the streets of Greenwich Village. From 1987 through 1992, Johnson was an AIDS activist with ACT UP.

There were many things Severus thought he might find outside of his front door, but never in a million years would he have imagined the sight that was before him. Petunia Evans, which is who she would always be to him, stood there. She wore a bright red coat, a black hat tucked tightly on her head, and a polished pair of black leather boots. She stared at him with those strange blue eyes, as if she was studying him, trying to figure him out. 

“Why are you here, Petunia?” He asked, sighing and fighting the urge to roll his eyes

“Where is your mum?” She cried, looking past him and further into his house. “I need to speak to her and didn’t know who else I could turn to. We need her help.”

It was then that Severus noticed what was right there in front of his face. A boy, who looked quite a bit like Petunia herself, the same dirty blond hair that curled around his face, and another child who was quite a bit smaller. This one was James Potter’s spitting image, besides looking at him as if he was something so utterly magical. Harry, Dumbledore had said the child’s name was. _The Boy Lived,_ others called him, but surely that title didn’t fit at this moment -- their curls fell past their shoulders, their nose slightly upturned, their arms clenched around their skinny frame as if they were trying to keep the little warmth they could in. Severus felt like he was staring at a younger version of himself, and the very idea unnerved him. 

This had to be James Potter’s child, even if everything about them but how they looked screamed the exact opposite. Potter’s child would surely be snapping at him about the colour of his carpet, the fact his steps were crumbling, or the fact he had a toothbrush in his mouth. This child wasn’t James, but they weren’t Lily either. If he had seen them on the street, Severus would have never guessed _this_ was the child who was supposed to save the wizarding world, but he had been wrong about far too many things in the past. Maybe the prophecy was wrong, or perhaps it was about the Longbottom boy because this child was indeed many things, but there was a good chance a boy was not one of them. 

“My mother’s dead, Petunia. Now, what made you think the right idea was dragging two five-year-olds out in the bloody rain? More so when it’s common knowledge that you hate me, you made that quite clear the last time we spoke.” 

Instead of answering him, she launched herself at him, crashing into him like the waves slamming into the coast. Petunia said nothing. She just clung to him, babbling on about something he could not understand. She had fallen apart instantly, and Severus did not know what he could do for her besides untangling her arms from around him. 

He muttered, “I am going to put the kettle on, and we can talk. You and the children can come inside.”

He turned his back to her to do precisely what he said he was going to but clutching his wand as he did. Sometimes not everyone was what they seemed. 

  
  


***********

It had been going on for as long as Petunia could remember, or at least since she married Vernon. Her mother had tried to convince her not to marry “that man” as the woman called him, but she hadn’t listened to her mum’s snide remarks, not to Lily’s letters, and not to Eileen Snape when they ran into each other in the market down the road. That woman had no right to judge her. That woman’s husband spent all their money at the pub and let their child run around in rags. Vernon was not Tobias Snape. He was better than the brute, even if sometimes it didn’t feel that way. 

It had felt at the time like it was the right choice to marry him. To start a life with him and have the family she had always dreamed of. The one with the white picket fence, the manicured lawn, where there was money for all that was needed, and sometimes enough for what was wanted. A life like the pictures in the Woman and Home magazines her mother used to read, but real, with Petunia and the family she was going to have inside of them. They would live it and breathe it, and it would be lovely. 

One day, she could feel it in her very bones; she would leave Cokeworth and all pain there behind her. Until she seemed to only take it with her, but this wasn’t just shouting voices down dark halls or two people snapping over the supper table about how the potatoes were runny. No, Vernon was a shaken up pop bottle, and if you got too close, he might explode on you. Petunia had long ago learned how to walk the line not to upset those who tended to blow their tops easily, but Lily’s child had not yet learned such things. 

The child had been left on their doorstep, green eyes looking up at her, studying her, with eyes of someone who knew things they shouldn’t. The eyes of the baby who had seen his mother murdered in front of him. What else could she have done but taken them inside? Leave them? Drop them off at an orphanage? Even if she had wanted to, or Vernon would have tried to make her do it? Dumbledore had made it clear none of those were options for them. The blood wards bonded them together. The act of protecting Lily’s child was protecting themselves as well. In a perfect world, they would have continued on, the four of them as a perfect little family, with all the trappings of a happy life. But her mother, her sister, and the woman who had lived down the road had been right. Vernon wasn’t capable of such things, but then again, she really wasn’t either. 

Petunia tried not to get attached, knowing that there was a good chance Vernon was right. The child was rotten to their core. So she did her best to keep the toddler at arm’s length as soon as they didn’t need her every moment of every day. They were Potter’s child, and that meant they would be a wizard. This child would leave her behind as Lily had. This child would drop branches on her son when they were mad. This child would steal things. This child would make Dudley feel that he was less than and unworthy. This child would repeat the cycle that had played out so long ago. 

This child was a curse on their family or, at least, that’s what Vernon kept reminding her. 

And yet, this child’s green eyes cut her like a knife when she put them in the cupboard under the stairs, the first time she did it and every time after. They might be Lily’s green eyes that stared back at her, but the discomfort and suffering that filled them matched another pair of eyes, one that belonged to someone she tried to do her very best not think about. Someone who she had done her very best to leave behind in Cokeworth. Someone who had become a dark wizard, Lily had said in one of her letters, the ones Petunia would swear she hadn’t read. That they had gone into the bin, as she had insisted to Vernon when he asked about them, but they hadn’t. They were the ones that were _still_ hidden under her side of the bed when she wasn’t reading them behind a shut door like now.

What her husband didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, and they were just letters or at least that’s what she told herself. One day she would give them to Harry, and maybe it would help him know his mother even a tiny bit. Petunia was snapped out of her musings by the sound of Vernon’s screaming. It was an odd and shrill sound. It was the kind of noise her mother would take when she found out father had spent half his paycheck on horse races. The type of sound she made when Lily did something _really_ strange with magic. The kind Eileen made when Tobias smacked her. The kind of squeak that meant the person was horrified, uncomfortable, and might be pushing against their reality—the kind of someone scared. 

Something that could be like seeing your “normal” nephew use magic. It did not matter how many times she had warned Vernon that this would happen; knowing and seeing it were two very different things in the end. 

“I am coming, Vernon,” she called out, shoving the letters that she held back under her hiding place under the bed. “I promise it’s not as bad as it looks, okay?”

Petunia swung her legs over the side of the bed, her feet landing on the carpet. It was soft and comfortable. It was warm and safe. This was her home, and she was safe here. She didn’t want to leave this place, this home that she had made, and nothing was going to change that. She could take the bitter comments over the table; her mother had done that for as long as she could remember. She could handle the shoves her husband gave her to get her to move. After all, Vernon was a large man, and he took up quite a bit of space, but she always seemed to be in his way. He could tell her that her dinner tasted like sawdust, that she was too fat, that she was ugly, that she wasn’t worthy of love and care. But that was her price to pay. It was the result of her choices. This was the bed she had made, and there was no changing that. There was no undoing it. 

When Petunia reached the sitting room, the sight before her made her blood turn cold. Vernon had the child, Lily’s child, by the shirt collar and shook him as if he was merely a ragdoll. 

“That will teach you, won’t it,” her husband bellowed. “Boys don’t wear lipstick, boys don’t wear dresses, and boys don’t act like sissies.”

Petunia remembered something from her past digging into her mind like a dragon peeking its head out from a cave. She had seen this before; the players might have been different, but she had seen this before, and she wasn’t going to see it again. For the first time in a long time, Petunia wished she too had magic. But then again, if she had magic, this wouldn’t be happening. If she had magic, she wouldn’t have married him. If she had magic, everything would have been different. 

_‘Silly,_ _you don’t need magic to have courage!’_ Lily laughed in her memory, bright red hair hanging in her face. _‘You just gotta stand up for what you believe in and love others.’_

_Snape stood there a few feet away from them, with a rather sour expression. ‘Not everyone has courage, Lily, surely not your sister.’_

_‘Sev, be quiet!’ The memory of her sister snapped. ‘Or I will turn your hair purple. Wouldn’t that be funny, Tunie?’_

_‘No, I don’t think it would.’_

It was such a stupid thing to remember in that instant. So foolish. It was from a lifetime ago, back before Lily had been murdered, before Severus had joined monsters, and back when she felt okay. When the world seemed like a good place. Back before Hogwarts, Potter, Death Eaters, Blood Wards, and Vernon. Back when things didn’t seem so dark. 

Severus had been wrong, so wrong. Petunia had courage, but she was smart about it, cunning about it, and she knew that there were a thousand ways for this to go. 

“Let him go,” she murmured, trying to be non-threatening “Please? You can send him to his cupboard, and you can get to work. You don’t want to be late now, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” Vernon said, dropping Lily’s child like they were a sack of potatoes. As soon as Harry’s knees hit the ground, he was stumbling to the cupboard under the stairs. A child of five, terrified of someone who was supposed to love them. 

Petunia went about the rest of the morning, trying to get her husband out of the house as quickly as she could. She hid her worry, pain, fear, but most of all, the plans that she was forming. Both of her parents were dead. James Potter had no family to speak of. Vernon had made sure she had no friends, stripping them away like her father would pull bark off logs for his woodworking projects. Dumbledore cared little for the boy and even less for her. He had made that so bloody clear so long ago. Snape was a Death Eater, and he would be no help. 

But, there was another Snape who could help her. The same woman whose words stuck out sharply. Eileen knew about the magical world and could help her. 

She ushered her husband out the door, smiling and waving as she did with her hand resting on Dudley’s shoulder. They were a perfect picture of a happy little family, and yet bile rose in her throat as she fought the urge not to vomit. The hatred Petunia had felt for Vernon melted together in a sword, into one single thought; she had to leave this place and never look back. 

She didn’t tell either child about her plan. The fear that Dudley might call his father rather present. Petunia found the taxi service number, called them, and gave the woman the Privet Drive address, her voice cracking as she did. It was like stepping out onto the water but hoping that she would not drown. The taxi pulled up, and Petunia dressed the children in their coats, pulling on her coat and hat. She packed the two small children into the backseat and then climbed in after. She told the cabbie an address she could not forget but had not been to in years. 

“Miss, why on earth do ya want to go to Cokeworth?” He asked, “Surely, you misread the bloody address.” He added after a moment, his voice softer, “It’s the slum, miss, surely you don’t plan on taking your children to such a place? Your little girl and that boy of yours?”

Petunia slammed the car door, enjoying how the sound bounced around the space. She looked up at the Irishman, staring straight at him through the car mirror. “I grew up there; surely I know what it’s like far more than you do?”

He grumbled and sped out of her drive, but thankfully with his passengers safely inside. 

Petunia was doing something that she never expected she would; she was going home. 

  
  


*************

Petunia watched Severus from where she and the children sat on the sofa. She took in every detail of him. He was so different from the person she had known growing up. He was grumpier for sure if that were possible. He pulled on a shirt after a moment but left it open, showing off the scars that cut across his chest. The ones that helped him become the person he always should have been. There was no shame in his presence, which used to come of him in waves growing up. 

Severus Snape was not what he had introduced himself as that growing up. He had been like the child who was tucked into her side, shivering. He had been the reason why Vernon’s actions had the straw that broke the camel’s back. Petunia had seen another man do that to the child who had been in his care. Harry might not be the same as Severus, but he was the other side of the coin. Another child afraid of a man looming over them, leering at them, stuffing them into a box they would never fit into. There was another child who someone would be trying to beat the magic out of. But this time, she would be the one feeding said child to the lions. 

Petunia Evans stood at a crossroads, and the future was in her hands. 

The kettle whistled, snapping her out of her thoughts of the past. Severus came back into the sitting room, teacups floating next to his head as he did. They all landed on the table softly with not a drop spilt.

_‘Magic,’_ She thought. _‘Such a bloody nifty thing. Such an impressive thing. But most of all, such a powerful thing.’_

“How did you do that?” Harry asked Severus. “Is it magic?”

“Magic isn’t real!” Dudley growled. “Don’t be so bloody stupid, _freak_!”

“Be quiet, children. Dudley, don’t you ever use that word again, or you will learn what soap tastes like,” Petunia muttered, tucking one ankle behind another. 

Severus ignored the children as if they weren’t even there and took his seat in the armchair in the far corner. “Why are you here, Petunia?” 

He was an odd-looking man, with inky black hair hung around his shoulders, pale skin that spoke to the lack of sun he got, but most of all eyes that were sharp and calculating, as if he was tearing her mentally down bit by bit. 

Severus Snape, of all people, had no bloody right to do such a thing, not when he too had run away so far from Cokeworth that he went straight into the arms of a monster.

“Don’t look at me like that, Snape!” Petunia spat, “You of all people have done enough of your own shite to look at me like that.” 

“Now, Tunie, you shouldn’t speak like that. There are children in the room.” Severus muttered, cocking his head to the side as he did. His beak-like nose looked even more prominent than it usually did like that. 

“Aunt Petunia used a bad word,” Harry said softly, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Bad words are bad.”

She changed the subject, ignoring them both, “What happened to your mother?” 

“She’s dead, Petunia, not much else to say beyond that. My bastard of a father did what he was always destined to do, kill her and then himself not long after.”

Horror bubbled up under Petunia’s skin. She knew if things didn’t change, she or Harry might end up like poor Eileen Snape. 

“I answered your question, Petunia, now you must answer mine. Why are you here?”

“Vernon is just like your mum said, and I can’t stay with him anymore.”

“Petunia,” Severus said. “I think you should go home.”

“You are a bloody wizard, Snape!” 

“What does that matter?” He questioned, rolling his eyes at her. 

“I can’t go home, Severus, I just can’t!” She cried out, her voice shrill and narrow frame shaking, her body folding in on itself against her will. 

“The life you're seeking, Petunia?” He said sharply. “Is not poverty like eating the heel of the bloody loaf for breakfast, it’s opening your cupboards, and you see nothing but old tea and Bovril. That, Mrs Dursley, is no way to raise children. Even if one of them is Potter’s son.”

“Not a son!” Petunia hissed. “He’s...She’s... They are like you.”  
  


“Impossible,” he murmured. “The prophecy said…”

“The prophecy can burn in hell for all I care! I got a real flesh and child to worry about, and after what Lily said about you, I am wasting my stupid breath, aren’t I? You aren’t one of the good ones, and I have to bloody I don’t know. If you are going to do us in, Snape, just make it quick, okay? Please, for whatever you and I used to have… We were friends once, weren’t we?” Her irrational speech sounded like utter madness to her as if she had lost all good sense and sanity, but Petunia had nowhere else to turn, nowhere else to run, and no one else who cared. 

She was a boat set adrift. Soon Vernon would be home, and he would go looking for her. He would go looking for them. She had nothing to her name, not even the clothes on their backs. No job and no chance. Severus might be right, but nearly starving was better than watching Vernon nearly beat the life out of her sister’s child. She had done that before. There had been another man and another child. The scar that cut across Severus’ cheek reminded her of a past she desperately tried to forget. 

“I am not a Death Eater, Petunia,” he sighed. “At least not the type that’s going to do you in. The children will sleep in the spare room together. You can have my bed, and I will take the sofa. Everything else we can figure out when I get back from work, okay?” 

“Vernon?” Petunia asked, “He might be looking for us, and he will do God knows what.”

“If he does somehow figure out where you are and comes before I get back,” Severus said firmly, “You will call the police, and then you will send a letter with my owl, Aurora. You will tell her to go to Hogwarts, and I will Apparate to the alley a few streets over as soon as I get it, understood?”

“Yes,” she murmured. “Have a good day, okay?” 

“I teach teenagers potions; there is no such thing as a good day.”

  
  
  


********************

It had been years since that day, nearly as long as Petunia had truly known her sister. She found herself reaching for Lily and James’s photo from their wedding that was on the mantle but decided against putting it in the box. Severus didn’t mind it here, but they also rarely had guests at the house on Spinner’s End. That might change once they were at Hogwarts. Neither of them had planned this, to get together. The goal had been for her to get on her feet and to take the children somewhere else, but that had never happened or at least not in the end. 

Severus and Vernon were nothing alike: Where her ex-husband boomed, Severus muttered. Her husband tried so hard not to touch her when she was upset, Vernon would purposely invade her space. While Dursley had told her that everything she ever did was wrong, Snape, while he could be as grumpy as a tomcat, did not do that, or at least he tried not to. He might drink too much at parties in desperation to be like everyone else. But it wasn’t like that they went to many of them. But the fact was everyone had their vices. Petunia’s mind went to the pack of cigarettes in the pocket of her cardigan. 

She reached for a photo of Harriet and Severus standing in front of a Quidditch pitch, her niece’s long curls pulled high and tight. She looked neither like Lily nor like James, but her own person. Petunia’s husband, in the photo, wrapped an arm around the child and smiled. The rest of the team surrounded them, but she didn’t notice any of them besides the blond boy not too far away, who smiled shyly in Harriet’s direction. Draco Malfoy, Severus’ Godson and another boy who was finally starting to make the right choice. He, too, was stepping out onto the water and hoping not to drown. 

When Petunia first saw a therapist, the woman had told her, _‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.’_ She had agreed with her back then, but now all she could think was, _Well, this fish wants a bicycle, and there is nothing wrong with that_. She hoped she was doing her best to teach her niece that. Severus was teaching her that men _should_ be kind to her. She and Severus would teach Dudley how to be a good man, so history would not repeat itself for once. She didn’t know what had happened to Vernon, and she was okay with that. She did not want or need the man. 

Petunia tucked her wedding photo into the box. They looked so young and happy in it. The children were both in their Sunday best, Severus looked uncomfortable in his black suit, and she wore her mother’s wedding dress with it’s faded cream lace. Vernon had refused her idea when they married, but Severus said it was her choice, and it wasn’t like he was the one wearing it. They were a family, an odd one, but a family all the same. A photo of them as children: Severus, Lily, and herself also joined the box’s pile of framed photographs. Soon her husband would be here, and they would be heading to Hogwarts. It seemed becoming Headmaster had its benefits, one being that his family could live with him now. A lifetime ago, there had been three children, all trying to leave Cokeworth in their dust, but at this moment, Petunia hoped to take it with her. In a world with no boy who lived, but the girl whose mother had died for her? All felt right. 

_‘You were right, Lily,’_ she thought. _‘I do have courage, and so does Severus, but maybe it’s just a different kind than you did. I have the kind that causes me to put one foot in front of the other, even with you gone.’_

Petunia added Lily and James’s photo to the box; they were their family, even if sometimes she didn’t like either of them. Family was a painful thing, but it was also a lovely one. Love, after all, was the greatest kind of magic in the end. 

Long ago there had been three children in this town. One of them went on about what courage meant to her and how you had to stand up for what you believed in. Another wanted to run from this place, to leave and never look back. To place that could only be found in the pages of her mother’s “light reading.” But the last child, the odd one, with dirt on his cheek and eyes of a present that haunted him? He tried his best to tell them about stories about the men and women across the pond who were trying to make the world a better place for people like him. Stories that he had read in stolen magazines. 

Sometimes the one who starts the fight doesn’t get to see it through, and the rest of us must carry on. 


End file.
